fwiw ... you might be "successful" doing what you're proposing (if you choose a tiny feature set, and discard everything else everyone asks you for) ...but the

fwiw ... you might be "successful" doing what you're proposing (if you choose a tiny feature set, and discard everything else everyone asks you for) ...but the reason "out-of-the-box solutions" exist is because other folks have already spent the millions of developer hours, user feedback, etc to get it working :) Several years ago I worked for a company (filled with seasoned, smart, great devs) that tried to in-house their own reporting tool They quit and migrated to Crystal Reports because integrating an existing tool was worlds cheaper/faster than trying to do it all themselves Later they migrated to BIRT because of CR limitations And did another migration a couple years after that (I forget now to what tool) The only drawback from a end-user perspective of those migrations were that reports couldn't be automigrated between reporting platforms